Pedro David

Pedro David, Skyline, 2013. From the series 360 Square Meters, 2011-2014
Courtesy of the artist.

360 Square Meters2012

With 360 Square Meters, I intend to discuss the limits of photographic language by inserting pictorial and sculptural elements (and issues) in a confined space to build images loaded with aesthetic, symbolic, and metonymic character. Despite the small geographic space of 360 square meters that I am exploring, I want to address larger world with these images.

My series continues a trend that I have been developing since my series For Rent (2008), inspired by my “raiding” rental apartments when I needed to find a new apartment for myself, and the series Things Falling from the Sky (2009), when I collected together and photographed the objects that faced me every day on the floor of the service area of my apartment. In the series Last Address (2010), I photographed my mother’s belongings after her death before emptying the apartment where she had lived.

In mid-2013, a time marked by the “decadence” of photojournalism, once so important to the formation of “Brazilian photography,” we got used to having broad access to images of the world in real time and the possibility of taking long virtual tours online. As we finally came to move with greater ease in our new economic reality, we were able to reflect on the small dramas and the possibilities of creating meaning from the minute details of our surroundings.

For this project, I’m using a large format camera (four-by-five-inch plates) and an already rare black and white Polaroid 55 film. Photographs created with now obsolete film stock reference images from another time and suggest the archeology of a place once explored, but now extinct. Time is mixed in relative terms in the same way as I explore the scale of objects and scenes.

Pedro David

Biography

Pedro David was born in Brazil in 1977. He completed his B.A. in journalism at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais State, Belo Horizonte, Brazil in 2001 and attended graduate school in contemporary fine arts at the Escola Guignard, Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais, Brazil. He has dedicated himself to exploring the diverse relationships between people and their environment. He has published numerous books: Underwater Landscape (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2008); The Garden (Salvador, Brazil: Funceb, 2012); Route Root (Fortaleza, Brazil: Tempo d’Imagem, 2013); and Catharsis Phase (Belo Horizonte, Brazil: self-published, 2014). His works are part of the collections of the Musée du quai Branly, Paris; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil; the Museu Nacional da República, Brasília, Brazil; and the Minas Gerais State Museum, Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

Pedro David’s latest work, 360 Square Meters, was awarded the Marc Ferrez Prize of Photography by the Brazilian Art Foundation (Funarte) in 2012. He has had a Photoquai Residency by the French Musée du quai Branly in 2012; and the first Nexo Foto Prize in Spain in 2014. He has participated in many group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad since 1999, including Noorderlicht Photofestival (2005, 2008 and 2009), The Netherlands; 5th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts (2006), Liége, Belgium; Fotoseptiembre (2011), Mexico City; 00 Generation (2011), São Paulo; the Latin American artist exhibition Esquizofrenia tropical (2012) at PhotoEspaña, Madrid; Photoquai (2013), Paris; and the 1st International Photography Biennial of MASP (2013),
São Paulo and Curitiba, Brazil.